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| photo: Carrie Schechter | |
Darcie Chan is the author of The Mill River Recluse and The Mill River Redemption (Ballantine Books, August 26, 2014). For 14 years, she worked as an attorney drafting environmental and natural resource legislation for the U.S. Senate. She now writes fiction full-time and lives near New York City with her husband and son.
On your nightstand now:
Still Life with Bread Crumbs by Anna Quindlen, The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, The Museum of Extraordinary Things by Alice Hoffman, The Shining and Doctor Sleep by Stephen King (still working up the courage to read these) and Songs of Willow Frost by Jamie Ford. As you can see, I'm woefully behind in my reading, which always happens when I'm working to complete a manuscript.
Favorite book when you were a child:
The Black Stallion series by Walter Farley.
Your top five authors:
In no particular order: Anna Quindlen, Alice Hoffman, J.K. Rowling, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Jodi Picoult and Betty Smith. Oh, wait, that's six! And there are so many others who are just as wonderful. And so many more whom I have yet to discover!
Book you've faked reading:
Ulysses by James Joyce. I was supposed to read it for an English survey course in college, and it was completely impossible.
Book you're an evangelist for:
The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey and The Shipping News by Annie Proulx. Both of these books are exquisite, and I've recommended them to every reader I know.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman.
Book that changed your life:
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith was the only book ever given to me by my late paternal grandmother. When, as a teenager, I finally got around to reading it, I was so moved and amazed by the story. It gave me a new perspective of my grandmother as a person, too. Except when I was a very young child, I had always lived a long distance from her, and I really didn't have the opportunity to get to know her as well as I would have liked. She was an avid reader, though, and she loved A Tree Grows in Brooklyn enough to give me a copy. To date, it's still my favorite book. That I also fell in love with the story makes me feel as if we had something in common--a shared, grown-up connection I didn't have with her, and couldn't have understood or appreciated, when I was a child.
Favorite line from a book:
Annie Proulx, describing the character Quoyle in The Shipping News: "Some anomalous gene had fired up at the moment of his begetting as a single spark sometimes leaps from banked coals, had given him a giant's chin." Every time I read it, I marvel at how brilliantly it's crafted--how creative imagery and humor are perfectly infused in the sentence.
Which character you most relate to:
As an adult, I haven't really "related" to a character I've read. But, as a child, I totally understood how Laura Ingalls Wilder must have felt as a little girl when her family moved away from the big woods of Wisconsin. I was also born in Wisconsin and lived there until I was six, when my family moved away. It was the first time I'd had to leave a place where I had lived, and it was a special place--the house of my childhood, built by my father, with my grandparents' house next door and a yard full of old oaks where I played. I'm still nostalgic for it.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
I would love to take all seven Harry Potter books and read them without stopping, one after the other. Just having the uninterrupted time to read that much in one fell swoop would be a luxury, and being able to savor those books, to discover things I missed when I inhaled them the first time, would be absolutely divine.